In Germany, the big bet is on Merz

Just days ago, Germany’s outgoing parliament cleared a €1tn spending package sought by the country’s chancellor-in-waiting. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on Friedrich Merz’s, a leader who could almost be Germany’s anti-Trump Trump. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and readthrough the day it drops

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The Big Story:

The German election [of February 23] thrust a mix of actors and issues to the fore and put the spotlight on east-west political faultlines from the Cold War era.

The leading man on the stage of Europe’s biggest economy is incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz. He has hit back hard at the Trump administration’s savage criticism of Europe. Merz looks set to assume the role of Germany and Europe’s anti-Trump Trump.

Like Trump:

Merz professes passionate admiration for America and for Ronald Reagan, as well as profound scepticism of government intervention. He often quotes Reagan…

He is a multi-millionaire, an older white guy who plays golf and has his own private plane (which, unlike Trump, he flies himself)…

Unlike Trump:

Merz is thin, a born-and-bred Catholic and is still married to his first and only wife.

He has a decided affinity with the law. Merz trained as a lawyer, his father was a judge and so is his wife.

This Week, Those Books:

A former citizen of East Germany argues for more respect for the ex-communist part.

A novel that tries to bridge the gap between East and West Germany.

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Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990

By: Katja Hoyer

Publisher: Allen Lane

Year: 2023

UK-based historian Katja Hoyer was five when the country of her birth, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or communist East Germany, ceased to exist as an entity.

But as Hoyer explains, it didn’t pass out of history. The country was around for 41 years, left a mark and if you look at it with “open eyes”, you can see “a world of colour…”.

This book reminds me of London academic Lea Ypi’s Free2 about reprising life in Communist Albania where she was born. Hoyer points to how the GDR created “the highest living standards in the communist world in the 1970s”…

Hoyer is on record that arrogance towards easterners (Ossies) lives on today. For instance, the fact that the former GDR votes heavily for the far right AfD…

The Granddaughter: A Novel

By: Bernhard Schlink (translated by Charlotte Collins)

Publisher: Hachette

Year: 2025

For Bernhard Schlink the past is never past. His new novel tackles the continuing divisions of reunified Germany. In particular, the former East Germany’s sympathy for the far right.

The story opens with elderly Berlin bookseller Kaspar arriving home to find his wife Birgit drowned in the bathtub. Birgit, who was born and brought up in East Germany, was an aspirational writer and alcoholic. Kaspar finds her autobiography and discovers that his wife had a baby daughter she abandoned at birth but always hoped to meet…All around the former GDR there is talk of moving on from “guilt” for the past…

Choice quote:

If a thing was serious, she took it seriously. Only later, after the Wall came down, when he became better acquainted with booksellers from East Berlin and Brandenburg, did he understand that in this Birgit was a child of East Germany, of the GDR, of the proletarian world that, with Prussian socialist fervor, yearned to be bourgeois and took culture and politics seriously, as the bourgeoisie had once done and had forgotten how to do.

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